Random musings from a "rabid" reader. The title comes from my admiration of John Updike and his Rabbit Angstrom series.When I read a review of a book I have not read, I only read enough to get a general idea of the content. If it sounds interesting, I make a note of the review, read the book, and only then do I go back and read the review completely. I intend these short musings to convey that spirit and idea to the readers of "RabbitReader."
--Chiron

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Gentle Action by David Peat

Is the attention span of people who read business books really this short? How many times am I going to be able to force myself to read this crap. “Business ethics” is the classification the publisher gives this book, and that is an oxymoron if I ever heard one. The covers and inserts are filled with blurbs from CEOs of “feel-good” companies. Great. I hope they can run their businesses gently. I don’t want to tell my book club, “No more!”

But, as you can imagine, no Exxon, or WalMart, or CitiBank executives here. Oh no, their god is profits, their sacrament is greed, and their mantra is exponential growth, regardless of the consequences to employees, the environment, or the country.

I did a little research on Mr. Peat, and I saw the most bizarre CV I have ever come across, and believe me, I have seen many, many hundreds – from professionals and amateurs.

To give you an example from the text, he leaps from “medieval looms” to Charles Babbage and computers. A simple Google search showed me several sites that listed the late 17th century as the date of the invention of the mechanical loom. He also mentions punch cards, but the prose is so fuzzy and poor, I can’t tell if he means looms or computers with punch cards.